Sorare - Final Update - Honest Betting Reviews

It’s been over a year since we started our portfolio tracker of fantasy football platform Sorare so we thought it was about time to wrap things up.

It’s been one hell of a ride and we couldn’t have imagined when joining the kind of excitement and returns seen since then.

Rather than rehash the whole thing – which would take a while! – we thought better to just pick out some of the highlights we have seen on Sorare over the last year or so:-

Introducing Limited cards, which opened up the game to thousands of new users by making it more affordable
Signing La Liga, the Bundesliga and just in the last couple of weeks, Serie A to the platform
Raising $700m in funding, which gives them the firepower to become a huge global brand
Signing Kylian Mbappe as an ambassador, which was a huge coup and will hopefully lead to lots of exposure for Sorare going forward
Launching baseball, their second sport on the platform
Introducing new game modes, giving lower budget players the chance to win
Introducing Legends cards of some of the greats of the game (although there was a considerable delay in being able to use them)
The upgrade to Starkware which made transactions much faster and cheaper (for Sorare that is, as they still cover the costs).

So it’s been a pretty incredible last 18 months or so and those are just some of the highlights of the amazing achievements of Nicolas and the team.

In terms of personal highlights, there have been lots of card wins but I haven’t had one *huge* win yet and am still to podium. I have had lots of good wins though – probably the one I remember most fondly was the first time I landed a big win, finishing 8th in America D3 (as it was then) with over 400 points to win an Eloy Room card, which was worth around $1,000 at the time.

My favourite lineup was probably this one, which I came 4th with in the All-star Division – oh so close to that elusive podium…

What’s next for Sorare then and where could they go from here?

Well the priority for them and the thing users are all clamoring for is the Premier League. They are still in negotiations apparently but if they could land the deal it would be huge and could take them to another level altogether.

There is also the prospect of other sports, with golf and another US sport being rumoured to be on the cards.

We are starting to see some marketing initiatives too, with a deal with Transermarkt recently agreed to feature Sorare on their site. More deals like this could really see Sorare take off over the next couple of years.

So the future looks very bright for them and as mentioned last time it’s impressive to still see them prospering whilst the crypto and NFT markets have been collapsing all around them. New users are being added at a good clip, sales and transactions are holding up, card prices have rebounded (in Europe at least) and the baseball launch went well.

That resilience comes from the strength of Sorare’s game, which is highly engaging and fun to play. Other “web3” and NFT projects could certainly learn a thing or two from Sorare.

We’ll sign off here then and just say we hope you’ve found these updates useful and as ever just drop us a line at info@honestbettingreviews if you have any questions about Sorare or anything else on the site.

You can sign up to Sorare here and get 13 free cards to get you started.

—————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————

Sorare – Live Portfolio Tracker

6th July 2022

Sorare is a new platform that combines digital trading cards with fantasy football and is a service we have been enjoying for over a year now.

It’s a bit like online versions of Panini stickers which you buy and can then enter into fantasy football contests to win prizes.

It is relatively new but has seen tremendous growth recently, having raised $680m in venture capital last year. If you want to know more about Sorare and how it works, please check out our full Guide here.

We are tracking our own progress on Sorare below.

Just a reminder to only invest an amount you are willing to lose in a new platform like this, in the same way as if following a tipster you would set aside a betting bank you would be willing to lose if the tipster had a really bad run.

You can sign up to Sorare here and get 10 free cards to get you started.

My Results

Things have quietened down a bit for me in terms of rewards. Partly this is down to the European leagues being on Summer break, partly down to a spate of injuries and partly down to my players not quite performing – plus a few selection mistakes myself. 🙁

Still, a return of 10 card rewards worth approximately €480 is a decent return, plus a few ETH thresholds is not to be sniffed at in a tough month.

It is just a month now until the European leagues kick off again, which will be very welcome and should get things moving in the right direction again.

Sorare Updates

Although it’s been a quiet time on the football front, it’s still been an exciting time for Sorare.

Most exciting of all was the news that have signed global superstar Kylian Mbappe as a brand ambassador and major investor.

https://twitter.com/ni2las/status/1542101074395406336

On the face of it this is huge news as the French forward has over 80m Instagram followers and is surely poised to take over the mantle as the world’s best footballer as Messi and Ronaldo come towards the end of their careers.

However, Mbappe has not promoted Sorare yet on his timeline, so it remains to be seen if he will actually be actively promoting Sorare to his millions of followers or not.

Hopefully there is some activity planned ahead of the new European season, but if not it is questionable how much this partnership will actually help Sorare in terms of bringing in new users and growing the platform.

New Game Modes

The other major news is the introduction of new game modes. These include:-

More rewards for the Casual league – 100 Limited cards will now be given out in the free-to-play league
An “Academy League” – for new managers who don’t play any of the other main leagues. You will be allowed 3-5 common cards and a maximum of 2 Limited cards
Super Rare Kickoff and the Unique Kickoff – you need just one of the designated cards, so is a good way to progress.
Special Threekly for Super Rare and Uniques
Special Freshly – the higher your card’s XP bonus level the lower the score bonus – this is to encourage people to buy newer cards on the market
An over-32 and under-23 Specialist league

You can read more about these new game modes here.

All of these new game modes are welcome and add a bit of spice to proceedings. However, there is a risk of over-complicating things, particularly for new users.

We have been saying on this blog for over a year now that one of the major obstacles to new people joining the platform (in addition to the crypto element) is the complexity of it.

Sadly Sorare have failed to heed our warnings and still don’t have a good help section on the site with video tutorials and the like. We were glad to see this raised in a recent episode of the John Nellis podcast so clearly we are not the only ones thinking this.

It surely wouldn’t be too difficult to have some videos covering things like: what do the different colour cards mean? How to deposit and withdraw; the scoring system; how to buy and sell cards etc.

Yet they haven’t done this, but still make it more complicated for new users to understand with these new game modes. Even as highly engaged users we are struggling to get our head around all these new developments, so we can’t imagine what it’s like for a new user.

Market Picking Up?

In any event, there are tentative signs of the market picking up, with more volume on the secondary market, prices of the big-name players ticking up and new users continuing to join in decent numbers.

Offer Volume on Sorare from soraredata.com

It’s actually impressive that the Sorare market has held up as well as it has (despite something of a dip as noted in our last couple of updates) when you consider the overall picture in the crypto and NFT markets as outlined in this Guardian article.

Basically crypto and NFT markets have been in freefall with major players collapsing all over the place. Sorare however has experienced a relatively minor dip – estimated to be around a 25% fall in the value of the top players – and is now showing signs of rebounding.

That is really encouraging and is testament to what we have been saying on this blog since the outset over a year ago – that Sorare is a highly engaging game and is fun to play.

That means people have continued to play it and kept (most of) their money in despite the testing economic conditions. Other “play to earn” games or NFT projects have collpased because at their core they weren’t fun or didn’t offer their users anything other than the ability to earn from them – which in many cases couldn’t be sustained anyway.

It has also helped that Sorare raised over $700m last year, which should help it to weather any storm – although to be fair at the moment it looks like it remains highly profitable and wouldn’t need to dip into that money anyway. It’s good to know there’s a pot of money there though – and there are even rumours of a Series C fundraising round, which would make sense given Mbappe’s strategic investment.

To raise more VC funding in the current climate, when all around we hear of such funding drying up across the board, would be highly impressive.

That’s just speculation though so we shouldn’t put too much store on it. For the moment it’s enough to say that it’s good to see Sorare still doing well in a very tough environment for the sector. We are certainly continuing to enjoy it and very much looking forward to the start of the Europen season.

You can sign up to Sorare here and get 10 free cards to get you started.

—————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————

Sorare – Live Portfolio Tracker

6th June 2022

Sorare is a new platform that combines digital trading cards with fantasy football and is a service we have been enjoying for over a year now.

It’s a bit like online versions of Panini stickers which you buy and can then enter into fantasy football contests to win prizes.

We are tracking our own progress on Sorare below.

You can sign up to Sorare here and get 10 free cards to get you started.

My Results

In terms of my own results, things have slowed down a little bit compared to last time which is to be expected as the European season has come to an end and there are less contests to enter.

Still I have managed to pick up some nice rewards, including young Portuguese wonderkid Fabio Vieira for finishing 14th in U23 Limited. I was delighted with the prize as he’s one of the best U23 midfielders out there and a player I had been considering buying anyway.

I was also very pleased to win Agustin Palavecino for finishing 35th in America Rare, a card which I sold for just under €500.

Overall since the last update I have won 6 cards with an estimated value of €1388.

Gallery Reshape

I have also been reshaping my gallery ahead of the next European season. My overarching strategy in this is as follows:

To sell off a large portion of my limited cards and put the money towards rare cards. The thinking behind this is that scores required to win prizes keep going up and next season could well increase significantly. This is being seen everywhere but is particularly noticeable in the Limited divisions and could get crazy next season when we could see another 500-1000 of each card released.
To have higher peak scorers in both Champion and Challenger Europe Rare divisions. As with the point above, having guys who score 60-70 is great, but increasingly that will not be good enough and you will need scores of 80+ to be competitive. So I have sold Casemiro at Real Madrid for example and bought Payet at Marseille who tends to get more peak scores.
To bring in more Super Rares to enable me to play in the Rare Pro divisions. Essentially the higher you go in divisions the less competitive it is (relatively speaking) and the scores required for prizes have not been increasing as quickly. So it makes sense to try and move up rather than down, which is what the game should be encouraging really. At the moment I only play All Star Rare Pro but want to expand this. The catch is that Super Rares tend to be crazy-expensive, so you really have to shop around and find some bargains, for example players who are bench-warmers, injured or out of form. For my first purchase as I was really pleased to pick Benjamin Andre for just €292, which is extremely cheap for a guy who starts pretty much every game and has very consistent scores, with the odd peak score now and then.

Next season could be a really tough one in terms of winning prizes so I am aware of needing to be on my toes and being prepared to make more moves in the transfer market when opportunities present themselves.

Sorare Latest – Market Slowdown

In the last update we remarked on the market falling and although things have stabilised a little, it doesn’t feel like we have quite hit the bottom yet.

One of the difficulties in being sure of this is there is no universal measure for the Sorare market. Soraredata used to have a market index for the top 50 players but removed it after feeling it was not operating as intended.

So in the main all we can do is look at player prices manually and get a sense of things. Doing this you can still see a lot of prices falling or remaining flat.

Another indicator to look at is the offer volume and although this has improved lately, once you take into account the drop in the value of ETH, it would look less remarkable.

The other factor to keep an eye on is the number of new users joining Sorare and that has remained well below levels of a few months ago, with 100-200 new users per day at the moment versus 300-400 at the peak a few months ago.